POINTS of INTEREST

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 75, Issue 13, 16 January 1932, Page 13 (Supplement)

POINTS of INTEREST

PUTTING INDUSTRY ON ITS FEET. Some further information regarding the Bank of England’s new activities was given later by the Deputy Governor, Sir Ernest Harvey. “Various industries have approached us through different ehan-.els, and a short time ago we registered a private company, in which we hold the whole of the capital,” he said. 41 Our object was to make it quite evident that this business was something distinct from our normal functions. We obtained the whole-time services of various experts, technical, accountancy, legal, and one who we thought, having had very close contact with labour and labour questions, would be able to voice in the discussions the views and feelings of a responsible and well-informed representative of Labour. Four such experts have definitely engaged, who are directors of this company. The objects of the company are to advise industry, to examine schemes for reorganisation, rationalisation, and so on, to advise where we think schemes may be unsound, to provide in some cases some of the initial money, to ensure that schemes are of such a nature as to justify appeals for financial assistance in other quarters; and all with the object of getting these industries into a position in which they can appeal to investment credit. It is alleged that the Bank of England, in entering the industrial fielo, is in fact trying to | secure permanent additional business. As soon as we have put an industry on its feet and can feel assured that it is in a condition in which it can fairly appeal for investment credit, it is for us to withdraw and to secure the release of our money so that it may be available, if necessary, for the help of other industries.” The name of the company is the Securities Management Trust. THE SPIRIT OF ENTERPRISE. ,r A vigorous spirit is moving in Lancashire,” says the Tinies. “The county is the home of great industries—cotton and coal and engineering and shipping —and the scale of its dairy farming would surprise most people who are not aware of th' facts. The county wants new and varied industries and, wanting them, is not content to leave them to turn ip if and when they will, but is resolved to scour the world for the men of enterprise who are seeking where they may advantageously plant new undertakings. . . . When the business man abroad thinks of England he is to be constantly reminded of Lancashire, and information about Lancashire and what its every locality can offer in the way of sites and buildings and advantages for traders is to be available, in clear and concise statement, in a central office in London. Now is an opportune time. The resolve is that Lancashire shall make a new name f_,r itself in the world—a name to rival London’s, if that be possible. Prosperity may have deserted Lancashire for a while, but the pluck and resourceful confidence that pave the way to prosperity arc there still.” BANK OF ENGLAND POLICY. An authoritative stetement of the policy of the Bank of England by Mr. Montagu Norman, Governor of the bank, himself has been made available by the publication of the evidence taken by Lord Macmillan’s Committee on Finance and Industry. At the opening of his evidence. Mr. Norman said there were two things externally to which, over the vears he had been working at the Bank of England, he had really devoted the greater part of his time. 41 The first of those—long, troublesome, and in some ways disappointing—was the stabilisation of the European countries which had lost what they had possessed before the war,” he continued “That, which I thought, and still think, was necessary, although difficult in many ways, is to-day and has been for some time in the main achieved. The second thing was in many ways more difficult, and to some extent has been less achieved, but is in process thereof: that was to bring about co-opei-ti<n among the Central Banks of Europe and the world on the sort of lines which were originallv sketched at Genoa. The latter followed the former.” A BASIS FOR REFORM. **lt may be suggested that we shall not far toward a solution of the essenti 1 difficulties of the problem of unemployment insurance until the State ceases to take a share in the insurance,” Mr Cox continued. 4 4 The State was first brought into this partnership on the reasonable ground that it is to the interest of the whole nation, as well as of the individuals directly concerned, to prevent suffering to persons who cannot obtain employment. This will be admitted by every one; but ‘ surely it would be wiser to postpone the financial intervention of the State until tne cover provided by insurance has run out. In the meantime the State may reasonably leave the workers to insure themselves against unemployment through ‘approved societies.’ Insurance would still remain compulsory both on employed and on employers, • but it would be conducted through more or less independent organisations. Toward such bodies both workpeople and employers would feel a higher sense of responsibility than they feel to the re- ‘ mote abstraction of the State, and there would consequently be fewer cases of presenting dishonest claims for benefit. Simultaneously the central Government would transfer to the public assistance committees the whole responsibility for dealing with persons who come outside the range of insurance, and relief would be granted only to persons who could prove real need. .... The committees would re-I ceive contributions from the central I Government, subject to the condition that less than half the cost should fall upon the national exchequer.” i

THE MYSTERY OF STALIN. 44 Stalin’s real position remains as obscure as the reasons for his rise to power,” says a writer in the Times Literary Supplement. “It is, indeed, one of the greatest enigmas of the Bolshevik Revolution that while we know almost all that can be known of the external history of this man, there is in the end nothing of the man himself that we know. In judging him all the criteria of history fail, new materialist as much as old idealistic. Stalin was born a poor man, and retains to this day what the cosmopolitan Jews of the Soviet Foreign Commissariat call a poor man’s ‘roughness.’ Yet even Lis bitterest enemy would find it hard to produce from the record of his career one single instance in which he could without hesitation be said to have been actuated by a poor man’s envy. He was a band tin youth —a simple, downright bandit, who shot people for money —and in recent internal quarrels has shown that he has not forgotten simple bandit ways. But he is also the urbane politician who replies with irony and satire, the weapons of a cultivated intelligence, to attacks from Right and Left. He was a discipline of Lenin, a discipline of unquestioned sincerity. And in Lenin’s last illness he brushed Lenin and Lenin’s counsellors aside, while to Krupskaya he even went so far as to threaten the resurrection of another 4 Lenin’s widow ’if she persisted in deviation from the party line. There is authentic record of his kindness toward individual Bolsheviks, and record no less authentic of his almost unbelievable cruelty to old party comrades He is presumably a sincere Socialist, for he has gained nothing materially from the revolution, and in a dozen instances has taken the most difficult, line- at great risk to his own tenure of office. Through all the conflicting evidence of facts the man himself remains a mystery.” THE “DOLE” IN BRITAIN. 4 ‘The fundamental cause of the troubles that have arisen in connection with the dole is the pretence of insurance,” Mr Harold Cox wrote recently in reviewing the situation of unemployment relief in Britain. “The workman imagines that he is himself paying for all the benefit that he will be able to draw if he should fail to obtain employment. He overlooks the fact that he is only one of the contributors to the fund. The employer Iso contributes, and so docs the State; and ; together they contribute roughly double what the workman does. But he goes on thinking that he is entitled to get as much out of the fund as he can for himself. The evidence given before the Royal Commission on Unemployment Insurance in the early months of the present year is crowded with examples of the tricks played by workpeople to obtain benefits to which they have no moral claim. Many of these men in the ordinary business of private life are quite straight in their dealings with one another and with their own employers, but the Unemployment Insurance Fund, with the State at the back of it, is a huge impersonal organisation, and the average man cannot realise that he has any moral obligations towards it. Thus men who could fnd work with a little trouble j refuse to look for it because they feel , themselves entitled to draw the dole, ! for which they imagine that they have I paid.”

BY ROAD AND RAIL. “I remember vividly the difference in pleasure of journeys, when a boy, to an Essex town, by road and rail,” says Professor J. W. Gregory, of Gias gow, in a history of road-making. “The main road from London ran for miles parallel to the railway. The country was level and the road was straight, as it lay along the old Roman road. But every mile of it was of interest and beauty. In contrast the railway was hideous, with (for miles out of London) its fringe of yards, evil-smelling works, untidy paraphernalia, and glaring advertisements. Now the conditions are reversed. The road is lined with dull terraces of houses, and farther out is littered with garages and petrol pumps and raw villas. The railway has been made more tidy; it enters the fields sooner than the road, and wider views can bo obtained from its embankments than from the houselined road. So long as those who arcmost interested in the roads prefer them of a type which unavoidably disfigures the landscape, ugly roads will be provided. Fortunately, the cost of such roads is so high that they cannot be extended indefinitely.” COSMIC CLOCKWORK. “The astronomers telk us, as a certain fact —Eddington says that it is the most certain truth of science—that the whole universe is steadily and irrevocably running down like a clock. The inevitable end, says Jeans, is annihilation—annihilation of life, of consciousness, of memory, even the elements of matter itself; that is the doom of all that exists,” said Dean Inge, in a lecture in the Chapel of Lincoln’s Inn. “If Jeans and Eddington are right. God is no God at all, for surely a God under sentence of death is no God. If the universe is running down like a clock, the clock must have : been wound up. The world, if it is to I have an end in -time, must have had a i beginning in time. Is science itself driving us back to the traditional Chris- I tian doctrine that God created the ! world out of nothing at a certain date? ' That would be an amazing contradic- ' tion of some of the presuppositions upon which science is based. Or if an absolute beginning and end are unthinkable, is it not reasonable to assume that whatever power wound up the clock once may probably be able to wind it up again?”